Poor Elijah’s Almanack: Grand plans

Back in the twentieth century’s twilight, the National Education Goals Panel issued a report. The panel, a collection of administration officials, governors, and members of Congress, assessed the nation’s status regarding six education goals formally established in 1990. Here’s a capsule summary of the panel’s 1993 conclusions.

1. All children in America will start school ready to learn. According to the panel, half of America’s students were experiencing educational risk factors. Children were lacking “basic family-child learning opportunities.”

2. The high school graduation rate will increase to 90%. Almost half the surveyed high school dropouts blamed not liking school for their decision to drop out.

3. U.S. students will leave grades 4, 8, and 12 competent in challenging subject matter and prepared for responsible citizenship, lifelong learning, and productive employment. About a fourth of our students could master “challenging math,” and only a third were meeting reading standards. Just half of our high school seniors understood how government works.

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4. U.S. students will be first in the world in science and mathematics achievement. American students scored consistently lower than students from other countries in international assessments.

5. Every adult American will be literate and able to compete in a global economy. Adult reading and writing proficiency remained low.

6. Every school in America will be free of drugs and violence. More than half of all tenth graders reported that the misbehavior of other students interfered with their learning. Only half felt safe at school.

It takes just a quick reading to realize those objectives and results sound familiar, like maybe you heard them yesterday, which you probably did.

The first five years of a child’s life, and what he goes home to each day after school, profoundly influence his academic performance. That’s why special education mandates have been extended to preschool children, why states have instituted family intervention programs, and why state and federal officials are proposing universal preschool.

But do these efforts really offer remedies for our problems? Experts talk glibly about teaching “parenting skills,” but what exactly are they, and how did we manage to lose these “skills” as a people? Assuming traditional family responsibilities, as schools increasingly do every day, has markedly weakened schools’ academic focus. If one of our critical problems at home is the breakdown of “basic family-child” relationships, will further government intervention offer a healthy solution or only further weaken the family tie?

Social services experts counsel against “enabling” a family member’s irresponsible behavior by assuming that individual’s responsibilities. When they’re preaching about public education, they call the same “enabling” a “twenty-first century school.”

It’s hardly surprising that many dropouts report they don’t like school. School isn’t a video console. It isn’t supposed to be entertaining, especially if you expect to compete with nations where self-gratification isn’t considered a virtue. Yet many experts today prescribe turning classrooms into social media and video game arenas in a misguided attempt to entice students into “learning.” Others advise granting diplomas for “alternative” programs that aren’t diploma-worthy.

I’m not an advocate of boredom, but I’m less concerned about the effect of boring material and teachers, because some material and teachers have always been boring, than I am about a nation that touts “responsible citizenship” while it justifies students’ abandoning their responsibility because they don’t “like it.”

Our students will never be literate, competent in challenging material, first in math and science, responsible citizens, or productive workers until we stop making excuses for them when they aren’t.

It’s also not surprising that disruptive students continue to interfere routinely, often catastrophically, with other children’s education. Even as students, parents, and teachers continue to appeal for relief from disruption and violence, Congress, assorted state legislatures, and education officials pass laws and issue directives that hamper schools’ and teachers’ ability to deal with disruption and violence. The U.S. Attorney General and Secretary of Education recently implemented new regulations restricting, even punishing schools, for disciplining too many disruptive, dangerous students.

Is that how we plan to ensure our schools are “free of violence”?

Education grand plans, whether it’s the 1990 panel’s goals, or No Child Left Behind a decade later, or today’s Common Core, are conceived by conclaves of experts who don’t work in schools, amplified by bureaucrats on endless reams of paper, and then force fed in even more endless workshops to teachers who know that grand plans last only until the next grand plan comes along.

Apart from their education flaws and perennial lack of common sense, the problem with grand plans is their goals are about us, but that doesn’t make them our goals. Until each of us as individuals, students most of all, make education a private goal as well as a national sound bite, all the positive language, all the exalted “will be first” proclamations won’t make a bit of difference.

We’ve wasted half a century on grand plans. Some children choose not to learn, some children come to school from hellish places, and some of those hellish places are somebody’s fault. We have to be willing to hold responsible those among us, student and adult, who fail in their responsibility, whether it’s their responsibility to behave, to study, or to prepare their children to do both.

Even if that means pointing the finger at ourselves.

Peter Berger teaches English in Weathersfield, Vermont. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.